Dialogue with an objectivist (part 1)

Tomorrow I will return to my discussion on 1776 ideals applied to 2009. Today, I would like to discuss something different.

This weekend I had an interesting conversation with one of my relatives, who happens to be a hard-core Randian objectivist. He owns an impressive library of objectivist literature, namely “every book Ayn Rand has ever written.” (Interestingly, he also possesses many of Zecharia Sitchin’s works. But that’s a discussion for another day.) This relative (who I will not name) and I conducted an interesting discussion on politics and economics, which I would like to talk about here.

First, I would like to delve into some of what he believes, which he explained to me at the beginning of the discussion. Though his views are not exactly the same as Ayn Rand’s, they are still in line with mainstream objectivism. For the most part, he sees government as a pestilence that causes nothing but trouble. Not surprisingly, he wants to see a very laissez-faire government that does not interfere in any industry whatsoever, including healthcare, food production, education, and social security. He believes that taxing a person and allowing that tax money to benefit another person is the equivalent of slavery—the worst thing in the world, he said, is “to be a slave to someone else’s need.” To him, any form of income redistribution or taxpayer-funded service is immoral and unjust. Next, he believes very firmly in the concept of ownership—he claims that that all inventions were created by people acting individually and of their own free will. From this he derives he equally strong views on ownership: anything a person owns is their property, and no one else (especially not the government) should be allowed to take it from them. Lastly, he is a libertarian in the traditional sense—he believes that “consensual crimes” and crimes in which only the person committing them is harmed should not be crimes at all. Overall, his emphasis was on “letting the chips fall where they may,” a very objectivist dogma.

I, on the other hand, argued for a government that was based around the idea of a social contract, in which all citizens must help society as a whole. Though I did not argue with his libertarian ideology (as I am a libertarian in the social sphere as well) I did protest against a society in which the prime movers are profit-seekers. (I am no fan of objectivism, though it does interest me.) Though there was no real conclusion to this argument, there were some interesting points brought up, a few of which I would like to mention.

First, I argued that a social-contract based government is necessary for survival, especially in today’s world. Consider what would happen to America if it had no standing army—within days it would be invaded and conquered. Though my objectivist relative eventually conceded that a military is necessary, he firmly stated that government has almost no other role besides protecting it citizens. He then reaffirmed his point that government should never force people to give what they have earned.

I then went on to argue that a world without government regulation or interference would be far less desirable than one with it. He persisted that if industry is run by profit-seekers, “at least we know where they stand.” However, I brought up one of the central points raised in Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle”—rich capitalists can subjugate the world by maintaining a monopoly on the things people need to survive. (Unfortunately my objectivist relative had not read “The Jungle”, so the analogy was mostly lost. I suppose I shouldn’t have expected him to have read it—it is a socialist rag, after all.)

My relative then proceeded to reiterate that government should not force people to sustain other people who cannot earn a living by making them pay for things such as public education. However, I argued that the system he is proposing actually destroys the idea of equal opportunity rather than promoting it, especially in the case of education. (I will cover this in more detail tomorrow, as it became one of the main points of the discussion.)

Overall, this was one of the most interesting conversations I have had in a very long time, and for that reason I felt it was worth noting. It was very intriguing to talk with such a pure objectivist, whose ideas on what government should do are so radically different from everyone else’s. Tomorrow I will focus on the topic of education, which because one of the central themes of the discussion.